Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (28 page)

Observing the relationships that took place between staff and

prisoners relieved part of my boredom. Affairs were common in Holloway and I remember asking one girl, who had been having sex with an officer for months, how she managed to get away with it.

‘We meet in a certain place every fucking week and we do it there. It’s foolproof really; nobody comes by there except one of the governors!’

Normally, at lunchtime, I was unlocked before anyone else so that I could set up the equipment in the gym for the afternoon session. One day, walking down a landing, while most of the others were locked up, I heard shouting coming from a cell. I looked through the cell-door hatch and saw two people inside – an inmate and a member of staff.The inmate shouted at me:‘Go and get Officer X’, the guard who had forgotten to get them out. I went to the office and told the officer that Jo in cell number seven was asking to be unlocked.The guard jumped up, dashed to the cell and unlocked it. The two people inside were dressing themselves and I asked Jo what she was doing.‘Having a shag,’ she

replied,‘what does it look like?’

I applied for a job outside the prison gate, sweeping up and fixing the small garden.‘No.’The authorities told me I was too political, too high-profile and my sentence was too long for me to be con- sidered anything other than a serious security risk. Me? A security risk? What the hell did they think I was going to do? Tie my bed sheets together and escape through the front disguised as a prison chaplain? Someone had been watching too many movies. That was when I realised how seriously they viewed me as a prisoner. The length of my sentence in Lard Yao had been so normal as to render itself uneventful. Now I was top of the pile, almost Category A security. It was ludicrous.

One day at the end of April
1998
, I was not unlocked after the lunchtime lock-in, as was the norm.
What’s happening here?
I thought.

An officer stopped by.‘You’re going to Foston Hall tomorrow.’

Later that afternoon, one of the gym officers took me down to the gym. He looked a little concerned.

‘This is a security move, Sandra,’ he said, in reference to my move. He continued, ‘I don’t know what it’s about but security have either got it in for you, or the gym staff have, and you’re out of here.’

twelve

MakingTrouble

Dear Mum and Dad

My mind won’t settle, I’ve had the same problem for days and I think it’s from having to swallow so much negative emotion all the time. If I make a fuss about anything though, they will ship me out to God only knows where. I think it would be better to be doing what they think I’m doing rather than them simply thinking I am up to something. I have become a product of the system… survival is a lonely process.

Sandra

Letter home, June
1998

When I first arrived in Holloway, someone warned me not to get too settled in any prison because the authorities have a way of snatching your life away from under you, when you least expect it. It’s just a way to remind you where you are and who is in control. Was this simply paranoia, fear and loneliness talking? I didn’t believe them until I was transferred from Holloway to Foston Hall in Derbyshire, in April
1998
.

One day everything was going fine and the next I was in hand- cuffs, being driven to yet another prison.The only brisk snippet of information I had been given was from the baffled gym officer at Holloway.This was ‘a security move, Sandra’.

I was placed in a cell roughly the size of a large cupboard along- side two teenage girls.There was no running water and no toilet.

It was designed to disempower. ‘You might be able to sort them two out for us,’ said the guard as she was leaving.

Piss off, I thought. I might have no idea why I had been brought to Foston Hall but I wasn’t planning on sorting out any of their problems.As the cell was so small and the three of us were banged up for roughly
20
hours each day, I had to ask someone to take care of Syd and Flo; I couldn’t bear to see them caged up all day alongside me.

I couldn’t seem to stop crying.
How had I imagined for one minute that the British prison authorities would like me?Why had I been brought here? What had I done?
My mind buzzed as I tried to fathom the logic behind my sudden move. I was just another package for their warehouse.

I put in request and complaint forms by the handful, and applied to see the governor, board of visitors and anyone else I could think of. I needed to know why I had been taken there under such tight security. A few days after my arrival an officer told me the reason.‘You were suspected of being too familiar with a member of staff in Holloway and they wanted you moved out.’

That was it. I couldn’t believe it.After months of trying to work out how exactly I should be with the British prison officers, I had obviously got it completely wrong. Maybe I should have dropped to my knees every time I wanted to speak to one of them. Maybe I should have avoided speaking to any of them. The whole thing seemed ludicrous. I mean, I knew I’d never had great taste in men, but this was bizarre; there was certainly no one in Holloway I would have considered getting ‘too familiar’ with.When I thought about all the shagging and affairs that had gone on in Holloway and security knew nothing about them…

Within a couple of weeks there was some improvement and I was moved out of my cell. I had been told the authorities were worried I might ‘swing’ (commit suicide). I was moved into a single cell with a bathroom and large window.

The prison was built in the grounds of an old manor house and the wings were made like Swiss chalets. I looked out onto an open field and felt the wooden floor vibrate under my feet; such a strange feeling after so many years of concrete. I would sit for hours at night, mesmerised by the wide-open space in front of me. In the daytime, herons flew into the grounds and poked around in the grass while birds filled the trees. But as pretty as it was, it was still prison.

We were given matching curtains and bedcovers, but were ‘nicked’ if we placed a bottle of milk outside the window to keep it cold. It was the simple things that reminded us where we were. The officers knew exactly how many pieces of bread we should get at breakfast, but could never respond to anything out of the ordinary, like sentence-planning queries. Outsiders might think it was a soft option and that prisoners must suffer while inside but I hated Foston Hall. It didn’t look like a normal prison, it pretended to be too nice for that.

Foston Hall was where I first realised that it is not the condi- tions that make a prison. No matter how comfortable an establishment, it is the staff ’s attitude that can either make or break the psychological well-being of a prisoner. It is the staff who have all the power in a prison and if a guard wishes to make a prisoner’s life a misery they can do so, quite easily. Sadly this does happen and the prisoner can do little to protect themselves. It is unwise to make an allegation against a prison officer and virtually impossible to prove ‘unprofessional’ behaviour. Power can corrupt and, as I found, quite often does.

Having access to nice things like showers and newspapers does little to help ease the isolation and frustration. I so often felt as though I was drowning in confusion and chaos, at the hands of Her Majesty’s Prison Service.The conditions in LardYao had been awful but the psychological effects of the British prison service were far worse than what I had experienced in Bangkok.

*

Compulsory for all sentenced prisoners was the ‘daytime activity’ and the choice in Foston Hall was full-time work or attending daily education classes. I chose the latter. I had done word process- ing and numerous gym courses in Holloway. In Foston Hall, I sat in on anything: pottery, art, computing. I took maths and English exams, and signed up with the Open University, taking a founda- tion course in social science.Anything educational was a welcome relief from the tedium of prison life and the teachers coming in from outside every day brought with them a sobering sanity.

At this time I befriended a young offender by the name of Sylvie and we used to hold ‘toast ceremonies’ most evenings before we got locked in for the night.

We sat around, laughing and telling stories. ‘You know that teacher, Mrs X?’ she asked me.

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, she saw you today and said to me that people like you make her sick. People like you drive around in their flash cars laughing at heroin addicts like me. You’re the ones making big money out of drugs and don’t give a damn for all the problems you cause. She said you’re the reason me and thousands of other people in this country are heroin addicts.’

I was stunned but I pretended to Sylvie that I didn’t care what the teacher had said. The truth is I did care. That evening, over toast, in the confines of Foston Hall, everything made tragic sense. And there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing at all.

Every morning and every night I prayed for some news about my pardon.The waiting was endless and intolerable. On the morning of
20
May
1998
, a report came over the radio telling the world how Prime Minister Tony Blair had intervened in the case of the so-called ‘Saudi Nurses’ and that they were now due for imminent release.

Lucille McLauchlan and Deborah Parry were jailed in
1996
for allegedly killing an Australian colleague,Yvonne Gilford, in a hos-

pital in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Now King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz had issued an order commuting their sentence to the period they had already spent in jail and had ordered their release.

I could feel myself withering. Had I committed a crime so much more heinous that I was not worthy of such government support? One month earlier, the Prime Minister had visited Saudi Arabia and it was widely speculated that he had paved the way for the release of the two. It was a diplomatic coup on a grand scale.

My moods twisted and deepened into despair. In Foston Hall I was a one-off; most of the other inmates were nearing the end of their sentences and preparing to go home. Some of them were already attending ‘home leaves’, while others were preparing for parole or waiting to go to an open prison. I was serving by far the longest sentence and was nowhere near the end of it. With so many people applying for day releases and home leaves, I won- dered whether it would be worth my while doing the same.

‘You’re having a fucking laugh aren’t you, Gregory?’ laughed one of the officers. ‘They won’t let you out with your bird [sen- tence].You’re too high-profile.’ They wouldn’t even give me the form to apply.

It was early June in the education department and one of the teachers arrived with most of that day’s newspapers for her current affairs class. She took me into an office before her class and showed me what she had read that morning. The headline in
The Times
, dated
12
June
1998
, grabbed my attention –
MAN CLEARED OF DRUG SMUGGLING FINED OVER HEROIN
.

Robert Lock, the man cleared of drug smuggling when his co-defendant Sandra Gregory was jailed for
25
years in Thailand, has been fined by magistrates after admitting possessing heroin. Lock,
32
, spent three years in a Bangkok jail before being cleared and allowed back to Britain. He had denied trying to smuggle heroin while Gregory,
32
, pleaded guilty, claiming that Lock had paid her to carry heroin out of Thailand.

Now Lock has appeared before magistrates at Cambridge and pleaded guilty to possession of heroin. He was fined £
100
and ordered to pay £
69
costs.The court heard that Lock, of Cambridge, had been followed by a plain-clothes police officer in the city on April
9
after leaving an address known to be used for the supply of drugs. Police stopped him and searched his Ford Fiesta. He was later searched, and a single foil wrap containing

0
.
2
grams of heroin was found in his jacket pocket. Lock, who represented himself in court, said: ‘I am sorry for any trouble I have caused. It was a one-off affair.’

The
Mirror
newspaper carried a similar story, although much shorter, but in it there was a quote from my mother: ‘Sandra was telling the truth.’

An iceberg from my past had broken off and drifted away but now he was in my life again, staring back at me from a newspaper. ‘There you go,’ said one of the teachers in the education depart- ment, ‘you were telling the truth after all. Now everyone will believe you.’

What difference did it make to my life now? Even if Robert had been found guilty, I would still have been here. I was still guilty. People expected me to hate Robert and to feel smug about his misfortune, but I didn’t. How could I hate him? I didn’t partic- ularly like him but if I hated anyone I should have hated myself, for having taken him up on his stupid offer.

Joyce, the woman in the cell next to mine, was a rather eccentric Canadian who wore home-made clothes. A lot of her time was spent writing letters to Charlie Bronson,‘Britain’s most dangerous inmate’.

We spent our time moaning together about the usual stuff – the prison itself, the guards, the legal system, the other inmates and, ludicrously, how fat we were.We decided to fast.At the end of the first day we felt in control of a very small part of our lives so we decided to go without food for another day, and then a third.

We began fasting for three days just about every week for weeks on end. Being able to control something as basic as food – or lack of it – brought with it a sense of control and management. We decided to do our fast for ‘world justice’, something we had read about in a newspaper.

One afternoon I was taken to see the governor to request a visit to see my grandfather, who was ill.As I sat outside her office I told the guard that I was in the middle of my ‘world justice’ fast. She thought I was on hunger strike and that afternoon, after being told I did not ‘fit the criteria to see my grandfather’, four officers appeared in my cell, demanding to see a clean food plate ‘three times a day.’